Arrow Lake Intel 7 255H versus AMD Ryzen 9 HX 370
I've recently reviewed and tested a Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G8 with Intel Arrow Lake 255H and Topton TOPC with Ryzen 9 HX 370. Those are top-of-the-line mobile chips from Intel and AMD, and the question is - how do they stack up against each other?
Specifications
| Ryzen 9 HX 370 | Intel 7 255H | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU Cores | 4 Zen 5 cores up to 5.1GHz 8 Zen 5c cores up to 3.3 GHz |
6 Lion Cover P-Cores up to 5.1GHz 8 Skymont E-cores up to 4.4GHz 2 Crestmont E-cores (up to 2.5GHz) |
| Max TDP | 54W | 115W |
| iGPU | Radeon 890M | Arc 140T |
You can check direct comparisons on Notebookcheck for the CPUs as well as for iGPUs and as you can see they perform nearly identical overall but with few asterisks here and there.
Intel 7 255H vs Ryzen 9 HX 370 benchmarks
Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G8 limits the Arrow Lake SoC to around 30-32W of power, so I've set the HX 370 to 30W in the TOPC as well. Both systems were tested with a 2x16GB SODIMM 5600MT/s JEDEC RAM kit. There are LPDDR5X devices available, and those should offer somewhat better performance for iGPU gaming and some other workloads.
Radar charts use relative percentage results for each benchmark, where the Ryzen result was used as the reference 100%:
In those CPU and iGPU-focused tests, both chips perform near-equally outside singular outliers.
For FFXIV benchmarks, they tie for the current Dawntrail expansion:
For World of Warcraft, the differences can be bigger:
Ardenweald is the most GPU-demanding test, while the mass combat test on mode 7 (high settings) has a lot of particle effects, which is a bottlenecking factor for iGPUs. In those cases, the Intel SoC pulls ahead, which could indicate that Ryzen has a better CPU and Intel better iGPU for this game.
This is better visualized as relative performance on the radar chart:
eGPU benchmarks
For eGPU testing, I used GMKtec RX 7600M XT eGPU connected via OCuLink (PCIe 4.0 x4) and with an external display connected to the eGPU to maximize performance from such a setup. This GPU performance is similar to RTX 3060 desktop.
With eGPU, both CPUs perform nearly identically, minus the old Unigine Valley result. World of Warcraft still favors AMD CPU:
Comparisons
Summary
Both SoCs perform really close to each other, to a point that the given device will dictate how it performs and if it comes on top or not - TDP, cooling assembly, RAM type and configuration, and so on.
From differences - Geekbench 6 AI benchmark on Intel platform allows running tests on CPU, NPU, and GPU, while Ryzen could only run them on the CPU. Intel also has Lunar Lake, which is a low-power counterpart to Arrow Lake - a much smaller CPU, a bigger NPU, and a very similar iGPU, which can be an option when you want the longest battery life or a cool & quiet ultraportable device.
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